Islamabad
Pakistan Sugar Mills Association (Punjab Zone) is going to convene a General Body meeting of the Association on December 29, 2022 in which members from all across Pakistan will also be invited. Continuously decreasing prices of Sugar and the crisis-like situation in the sugar industry will be discussed during the meeting.
In a statement, a spokesman of PSMA said that the cost of production of sugar has now reached Rs.115 per kilogramme due to government’s decision of increasing the support price of sugarcane from Rs.225 per 40-kg to Rs.300 per 40-kg. Moreover, government has also increased the Sales Tax and other Bank charges manifold.
In this regard, the sugar industry will gather to devise a future course of action that whether to stop the ongoing crushing season or take any other step.
The PSMA had given suggestions to the government and hoped that the government will give export permission of at least one million metric tonnes surplus sugar which was later reduced to 0.5 million metric tonnes. But the government later finally allowed the sugar industry to export 0.1 million metric tonnes of surplus sugar.
This further brought down the ex-mill price of sugar from Rs.87-88 per kilogramme to Rs.80-81 per kilogramme. This quantity of exportable sugar is too low that international buyers are not showing interest in buying it.
On the other side, the burden of payments to the sugarcane growers on sugar mills is continuously growing and the sugar mills are finding themselves unable to pay timely to the growers. Moreover, the sugar mills are not in a position to bear huge financial loss.
The spokesman said that the sugar industry has appealed to the Federal and Provincial governments to steer the sugar industry out of this crisis otherwise the growers and the sugar sector will be badly affected and that situation will also get out of the government’s control.
